The Wall Street Journal had a feature article a week back with a look at the growing trend of consumers to ditch their cable service in favor of watching their television online.
The article has some good statistics, estimating that online 1% of consumers watch all their television online. Some of the problems identified by the article as to why consumers stick with the telvision experience: channel surfing is a natural behavior that is hard to duplicate online. Watching online requires intent on finding and watching a particular show, while TV is often used to fill up leisure time without direct intention on consuming a particular piece of content. Also, the delay between when a show is available online from when it aired can be factor.
The article discusses the trend of set-top boxes such as Apple TV, Roku and Vudu, and takes a look at the financial side of cutting the cable connection, with savings anywhere from $40 monthly up to $100 a month.
The article concludes with a great quote from Jeff Pulver: “Some people will [continue] to subscribe to cable, the way their grandparents did.” Yep, and a whole lot of us won’t.
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Teri 10.18.08 at 1:15 pm
We gave up our cable box a month ago. When we realized that there were maybe a half dozen shows that we really cared about, it was time to pull the plug. It’s only been a short time, so we haven’t missed it yet.
Great idea for a website, keep up the good work!